The Ever-Expanding University of California - Property Claims and the Battle Over People's Park - People's Park

The
Ever-Expanding
University of
California
Property Claims and the
Battle Over People’s Park

Maansi Shah
Columbia University

 1
     xxx

Students tear down fences at People’s Park in 2021.
Photo by Yesica Prado

Introduction
                   During the postwar boom in university student
               populations across the country, the University of
               California Regents (hereafter the Regents) used
               their power of eminent domain to lay claim to sev-
               eral tracts of land immediately to the south of the
               UC Berkeley campus, ostensibly to meet increasing
               demands for affordable student housing. The Regents
               proceeded to raze the existing low-cost housing
               complexes in the neighborhood, clearing the lots and
               evicting hundreds of residents, including students,
               in the process. Unbeknownst to the university at the
               time, this move was to precipitate a decades-long
               war between the university, students and community
               residents over eminent domain, property rights, and
               ultimately, the legitimacy of the university itself as a
               public institution.
                   One of those lots is now known as “People’s
               Park.” Although UC Berkeley built housing on three
               of the lots, one remained vacant for years. In the late
               1960s, student and resident groups mobilized to oc-
               cupy the then still-vacant, undeveloped land. Follow-
               ing several violent confrontations between students
               and the police, the university temporarily abandoned
               its claims to the park. Over the course of the next few
               years, students and Berkeley residents transformed
               the block into “People’s Park”, and reclaimed it as a
               site of protest, a center for community events, mutual
               aid, and a site or refuge and shelter for unhoused and
               transient communities.
                   Since then, the university has had several con-
               frontations with students and community members

over “People’s Park”, which has remained a site
occupied by and cared for by unhoused people and
community groups. People’s Park has grown increas-
ingly important in the wake of the ongoing housing
crisis. As UC Berkeley converts more and more of
the land around its campus into profitable residential
and commercial developments leased to private cor-
porate entities, People’s Park has come to symbolize
the resistance against the forces of the ever-expand-
ing and quickly privatizing University of California.
    In January of 2021, the Regents mobilized once
again to claim the lot for student housing, and has
been facing backlash from students and Berkeley
residents, who have occupied the park to prevent the
university-led development. As the university aims
to assert its property rights over the contested site, I
ask us to think about the legitimacy of the Univer-
sity of California as a public institution, and how its
expansion and privatization has been financed and
sustained by American state institutions, in pursuit of
military-imperial interests.

The Foundation of
the University of California
    In 1868, the first land-grant university in the state, the Univer-
sity of California at Berkeley was established through the Morrill
Land Grant Act of 1862. The Act conferred a total of nearly 11
million acres of federally-owned lands across the country to state
governments, whose sales provided funding for the construction
and operation of new universities. These land sales created the en-
dowments of 52 colleges and universities across the United States,
including UC Berkeley.1 Hidden from the university’s retelling of
its history, these lands were obtained through the dispossession of
Indigenous peoples by the United States government through poli-
cies of coerced treaty-making and forced removal.
    The Morrill Act was intended to open the fertile agricultural
lands in the Western United States to Anglo settlement, a realiza-
tion of the Lockean doctrine of Manifest Destiny that provided the
basis for American westward expansion. The American conquest
of Indigenous populations was fundamentally an agrarian project,
alongside a military and legal-political one. In California, which
was seen by many as the “final frontier” of American western
expansion, the project of Indian removal and dispossession was
particularly brutal. The state of California authorized and funded
local militias, encouraging settler-farmers to murder and forcibly
dislocate Indigenous communities, usually onto less fertile lands.
From 1845 to 1870, the Indigneous population of California plum-
meted from roughly one hundred thousand to thirty thousand.2
Indigenous land claims were dissolved, and California Indigenous
peoples remained unrecognized by the federal government, and

1
  Lee, Robert and Tristan Ahtone (April 2020). “Expropriated Indigenous land
is the foundation of the land-grant university system.” High Country News.
2
  Mamdani, M. (2021). Neither settler nor native: The making and unmaking
of permanent minorities. Wits University Press.

were therefore denied any compensation for the land sold to fund
university endowments. Of the 2,395 parcels of land granted to the
University of California, a full 96% were expropriated from 125
individual tribes without ratified treaties.3
     The land vacated by Indigenous peoples was declared pub-
lic, state-owned land, and was largely earmarked for agricultural
production, the primary basis for the American economy at the
time. The sales of these fertile agricultural lands converted landed
property into capital. The logics undergirding this dispossession
was that Indigenous lands were not being productively used, and
should be claimed by those who worked on it. Much of the land
was therefore sold or gifted to settlers for private property-based
sedentary agricultural uses.4 Some of it was conferred to newly
founded universities via the Morrill Act, which required that
universities offer courses in agriculture and mechanics, an attempt
to ensure the proliferation of American farms and factories.5 The
Act also charged universities with agricultural research to develop
new Western agricultural techniques to increase the productivity of
land, in order to domesticate “wild” Indigenous lands and further
the expansion of agribusiness. Finally, the Morrill Act stipulated
that courses in military tactics be offered, though the decision of
whether to require them was ultimately left to individual universi-
ties. In California, the State Organic Act of 1868 made two years
of military training mandatory for students of the University of
California.6,7
     Land-grant universities were immensely successful in develop-
ing and deploying modern methods of agricultural production that
transformed the American landscape into productive farmland.
Plants procured from around the world were introduced through

3
  Lee, Robert and Tristan Ahtone (April 2020). “Expropriated Indigenous land
is the foundation of the land-grant university system.” High Country News.
4
    National Archives and Records Administration. The Homestead Act of 1862.
5
 la paperson (2017). “Land. And the University Is Settler Colonial”. A Third
University Is Possible. University of Minnesota Press.
6
    Provided they were male and under the age of 24
7
  Johnson, Robert. “The fight against compulsory R.O.T.C on UC Berkeley
campus”. Free Speech Movement Archives.

these research institutions, disrupting Indigenous land use pat-
terns.8 In California, education in mechanics also propelled the
growing gold-mining industry.9 The University of California thus
served as a site for the disposal of stolen, surplus agricultural lands,
as well as a training ground to facilitate the agro-imperial expan-
sion of the settler state. At the same time, it declared its mission to
provide accessible, publicly subsidized higher education, and uplift
middle class Americans, a legacy that the university still celebrates.
A website commemorating the institution’s 150th anniversary
reads that the university was founded on “the audacious idea that
California should have a great public university—one that would
serve equally the children of immigrants and settlers, landowners,
and industrial barons.”10
    These dual goals should not be seen as contradictory, rather
they were necessary to maintain the legitimacy of the settler colo-
ny. All of the groups mentioned allowed for the continued settle-
ment and westward expansion of the American state, facilitated by
the university. The university also served as an instrument for the
production and proliferation of American agricultural knowledge.

8
 “Science Education in Early California Colleges, 1850-1880” Michael Brett
Weismeyer, Doctor of Philosophy in History, University of California, Los
Angeles, 2017
10
  Charter Day: A university is born. Light the Way: The Campaign for
Berkeley. https://light.berkeley.edu/o/charter-day-a-university-is-born/
11
  Winling, LaDale C. (2010). Building the Ivory Tower: Campus Planning, Uni-
versity Development, and the Politics of Urban Space. University of Michigan.

UC Agricultural Building, 1901
Berkeley Public Library archive

“Of the 2,395 parcels
   of land granted to
   the University of
California, a full 96%
   were expropriated
  from 125 individual
tribes without ratified
        treaties.”

The Cold War and
University Expansion
During and after World War II, the population of Berkeley boomed.
Due to its proximity to the shipbuilding and naval procurement
ports of Richmond, Albany and Oakland, the city attracted thou-
sands of wartime workers. In the decade between 1940 and 1950,
Berkeley’s population grew by 28,258, a 33% increase.11
    At the same time, universities across the country were strength-
ening their alliances with the federal government and establishing
new institutions for defense research. As the American frontier
shifted overseas, so too did the university’s designs. The University
of California was particularly critical in the American state’s war-
time efforts, as it operated the secret Los Alamos National Labo-
ratory in New Mexico and staffed the Manhattan Project housed
there, a massive undertaking to research, design and build the first
atomic bomb. This laboratory eventually designed and built the
nuclear bombs that were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in
1945. The team of scientists assembled for the Manhattan Project
was led by Robert Oppenheimer and later Norris Bradbury, both of
whom were nuclear physicists at the University of California.
    The collaborative relationship between the federal government
and university continued well after the end of the war, with univer-
sities providing critical knowledge production for the United States
government, both ideological and scientific. With the start of the
Cold War, there was an increase in the American state’s demand
for a skilled workforce for the fast-growing military-industrial
complex. In the postwar period, the University of California be-
came the largest educational recipient of federal defense spending,
receiving annual grants from the Department of Defense and the
Atomic Energy Commission.12 In 1945, the Truman administration

11
  Winling, LaDale C. (2010). Building the Ivory Tower: Campus Planning, Uni-
versity Development, and the Politics of Urban Space. University of Michigan.

founded the National Science Foundation and allocated funding for
university research from the budget of the Department of Defense,
which later shifted to the Department of Energy, NASA, and the
National Institutes of Health. Soon after, Earnest Lawrence, an-
other leader of the Manhattan Project, established two additional
national laboratories managed by the University of California for
the U.S. Department of Energy: the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Together, Berkeley’s nationally-funded research institutions had
facilities and equipment valued at over half a billion dollars, and an
annual budget of over $250 million, an amount exceeding the state
contribution to the entire University of California system at the
time.13
    As the eye of the empire shifted to the Third World, the re-
search focus of American universities likewise moved from
nuclear defense against the Soviet Union to knowledge production
to facilitate the domination of newly independent Global South
countries. In 1958, Congress expanded federal funding for uni-
versities, providing fellowships for study in areas deemed critical
for national defense, most notably area studies in Russia, Eastern
Europe, China and Southeast Asia, as well as programs in “West-
ern Civilization”.14 In the same year, Guy Paulker, a UC Berkeley
professor and consultant at the RAND Corporation, led a mission
at the university’s Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies
to train a group of Indonesian military and economic leaders. Less
than a year before a CIA-backed coup of the then Indonesian presi-
dent, Paulker chastised his Indonesian military trainees for lacking
“the ruthlessness that made it possible for the Nazis to suppress the
Communist Party”. In 1968, after an estimated one million were
killed in military dictator Suharto’s ruthless anti-communist purges
and a million more were languishing in concentration camps
under vague suspicions of ties to communist parties, a cadre of
five Berkeley-trained economists, known as the “Berkeley Mafia”,

12
     Ibid.
13
  Klare, M. (2007, September). “The Research Apparatus of U.S.
Imperialism”. NACLA.
14
  Szanton, David L. et. al. (2002). The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies
and the Disciplines. University of California Press.

were appointed to key positions in Suharto’s administration. These
economists were integral to transforming the Indonesian economy
into one friendly to international corporate investment.15
    At the same time, the CIA continued to run domestic operations
within universities across the country. At UC Berkeley, Vice Presi-
dent Earl Bolton secretly consulted for the CIA in the late 1960s
on areas ranging from “student unrest, contracts for research and
development, collection of covert information, [and] contacts with
foreign scholars”.16 Recent Freedom of Information Act requests
have revealed that the agency also provided funding to student
organizations, sponsored seminars for select professors, and shared
materials with approved faculty members about the Soviet Union
and China.17 The university thus continued to underwrite the ex-
pansion of the American empire as it grew beyond the borders of
the continental United States.
    Meanwhile, the end of the Second World War precipitated rapid
growth in university populations, as returning veterans claimed
government-sponsored education. The strain that this growth
placed on the infrastructure of university towns was particularly
acute in Berkeley.
    Meanwhile, the end of the Second World War precipitated rapid
growth in university populations, as returning veterans claimed
government-sponsored education. The strain that this growth
placed on the infrastructure of university towns was particularly
acute in Berkeley. The student population from 1940 to 1947
grew from roughly 17,000 to 25,000.18 Unable to support this
rapid population growth, Berkeley experienced a severe housing

15
   Bevins, Vincent. The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Cru-
sade & the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World. Public Affairs,
Hachette Book Group, 2021.; Scott, Peter Dale. “North American Universities
and the 1965 Indonesian Massacre: Indonesian Guilt and Western Responsibil-
ity 1965.” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 2014.
16
  Richter, L. (1978, February). “Papers Reveal CIA Ties to UC”. Triton
Times. UC San Diego.
17
   KPIX Eyewitness News (1967). “Ramparts Editors on CIA Activi-
ties”. Bay Area Television Archive. https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/
bundles/228147
18
   Siegal & Strain Architects (March 2011). “Smyth-Fernwald Property: His-
toric Structures Report.” UC Berkeley.

shortage accompanied by a decrease in affordability. The influx
of Black defense workers during the war combined with restric-
tive covenants which covered nearly 80% of the city exacerbated
unaffordable housing prices by creating artificial housing shortages
in submarkets, namely in the Black neighborhoods along the city’s
southern border.19
    Immediately following the war, to address the postwar demand
for housing, the Regents appropriated public funds from the state
and fast-tracked the development of student dormitories in build-
ings gifted to them by wealthy benefactors. In the following years,
the university rapidly ramped up the construction of student hous-
ing, with a stated goal of housing 25% of the student population in
university-owned dormitories.20
    The 1950s witnessed a period of rapid university expansion. In
1952, the university approved the acquisition of approximately 45
acres of land surrounding the campus using eminent domain. Near-
ly three quarters of the proposed acres were located to the imme-
diate south of the campus in Berkeley’s Southside neighborhood,
where they intended to build four high-rise dormitory buildings.21
    Much like other urban renewal programs across the country,
university expansion relied on the forced displacement of vulner-
able communities. In 1954, the university purchased the land on
which the federal government had built low-cost, racially inte-
grated housing for shipyard workers in the 1940s, to develop
affordable housing for student families. 22 In the late 1960s, the
university purchased the McKinley Continuation High School,
forcing largely the Black and immigrant students to relocate. The
Regents then leveraged this purchase to gain title to additional
land held by the Berkeley Student Cooperative, an organization

19
   Winling, LaDale C. (2010). Building the Ivory Tower: Campus Planning, Uni-
versity Development, and the Politics of Urban Space. University of Michigan.
20
   Siegal & Strain Architects (March 2011). “Smyth-Fernwald Property: His-
toric Structures Report.” UC Berkeley.
21
  University of California, Berkeley. “Long Range Development Plan”
(1962). Berkeley Capital Strategies.
22
   Codornices Village, as the development was then called, was at the time the
only large-scale racially integrated housing development in the city, and one of
the few developments in which Black people were permitted. As a result, by
1953, 80% of the residents of the housing complex were Black. In 1954, after

that provides some of the few remaining low-cost housing options
near the university.23 In 1980, after decades of petitioning the state
Department of Education, UC Berkeley successfully moved the
State of California to transfer ownership of the California School
of the Blind and Deaf into the niversity’s possession, claiming
that the school was hazardously located on a fault line.24 Over the
years, the university’s plans for the site ranged from an agricultural
college and graduate institute to a medical school and intramural
sports facility.25 Eventually, the university constructed low-rise
student housing on the site, which is now called the Clark Kerr
Campus. A later investigation revealed that state and university
officials had no concrete proof of an active earthquake fault line
under the school.26
    By the end of the 1950s, the university had constructed several
new residence halls in the Southside neighborhood intended to
house a total of over 2,400 students.27 The university ran out of
funds midway through the project and was therefore unable to ac-
quire some of the lots, one of which was to later become People’s
Park.

after having finished its wartime projects and facing no opposition from the
university, the federal government closed the project and evicted the residents
of Codornices Village. After the Cities of Berkeley and Albany turned down
the opportunity to convert the structure into affordable housing and demol-
ished it, UC Berkeley constructed housing for student families at the same site.
Kamiya, Gary. “When WWII brought blacks to the East Bay, whites fought for
segregation.” San Francisco Chronicle, November 23, 2018.
23
   The Berkeley Student Cooperative lobbied to lease the land from the
university to build student housing. In return, UC Berkeley demanded one of
the cooperative’s properties in return, thus further increasing its land holdings.
In 2022, the Berkeley Student Cooperative’s (BSC) lease with the university
ended, and the future of the Rochdale Village cooperative is uncertain. The
university is demanding that BSC pay for costly seismic upgrades in order to
maintain their lease, in spite of owning the underlying land. BSCAA Living
History. “Rochdale Village”. BSCAA Wiki, 2022.
24
  Kerr, Clark (1957). “Report of Special Committee to·consider Possible
Acquisition of the Heinz Plant and California Schools of the Blind and Deaf”.
25
  Burress, Charles (1979). “Shrouded UC Role in Deaf-Blind Removal”
The Daily Californian.
26
     Burress, Charles (1981). “Whose Fault?” The Daily Californian.
27
   University of California, Berkeley. “Long Range Development Plan”
(1962). Berkeley Capital Strategies.

The Battle for Lot 1875-2
    The pressure created by the growth in student populations also
resulted in an increase in conflicts between students and the uni-
versity, including contestations over public space and freedom of
speech. Prior to the Second World War, the university had insti-
tuted policies banning political activity and speech on campus,
cementing the idea of the university as a site for uncritical promo-
tion of the American state-building project. In the midst of Cold
War-fueled anxieties about the image of the university as a site of
resistance, the California Regents passed a measure mandating that
all university faculty sign an oath alleging loyalty to the Califor-
nia state constitution, and denouncing all organizations espousing
communism or the overthrow of the US government.28
For years, the university quashed student and faculty resistance,
firing any professors who failed to comply with these measures. In
keeping with these rules, a group of students moved political activ-
ity off campus, setting up tables just south of the main campus on
the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph, the main thoroughfare lead-
ing into the university.29 In the fall of 1964, the Regents abruptly
banned the tables from this area, proclaiming that the university
had recently discovered that it, in fact, owned the corner on which
these tables were set up, and that political activity was therefore
forbidden.30 As student frustration with the university’s hardline
policies continued to build, contests over political speech gave
birth to the Free Speech Movement. Starting in the mid-1960s, the
university’s Southside neighborhood became a hub for the coun-

28
     Gardner, David (1967). The California Oath Controversy, UC Press.
29
   These students were a part of a student-led political party called SLATE,
and were recruiting for an anti-discrimination campaign that confronted
businesses in Berkeley that were refusing to hire or serve Black people.
O’Donoghue, Liam (2018). “How a little-known Berkeley group sparked the
1960s student movement”. Berkeleyside.
30
     Rorabaugh, W. J. (1990). Berkeley at war: The 1960s. Oxford Univ. Press.

terculture, free speech and anti-war movements, and was notorious
for attracting anarchists, hippies, and communists. These conflicts
ushered in a new era of university acquisition and expansion.
    A decade after the Regents had proclaimed their intention to
condemn the remaining privately-owned lots south of campus,
property values in the neighborhood collapsed and residents
abandoned buildings rapidly falling into disrepair. As housing
conditions deteriorated in the neighborhood due to lack of upkeep,
squatters moved in to occupy the low-cost housing.
    In the mid-1960s, with the promise of newly allotted funding
for urban renewal projects near universities, the city designated
the Southside neighborhood as an urban renewal district.31 In col-
laboration with the university, the city planned to use the federal
funding obtained for the construction of dormitories in order to
finance the complete renovation of the commercial area along the
city’s Telegraph Avenue. A Berkeley Police Department presenta-
tion to the city’s Urban Renewal Committee fueled fears about the
Southside neighborhood, asserting that narcotics and crime had
taken over the area.32 Over the course of the next several years, the
Regents used their power of eminent domain to condemn 45 addi-
tional acres of land, primarily in the Southside neighborhood, most
of them purchased far below the original market values.33 The
university demolished existing low-cost apartments and reduced
population densities within the housing units, driving up rents and
forcing out “beatniks and hippies”.34
    In 1967, citing a “desperate need” for a soccer field on the site,
the Regents finally passed a resolution to condemn lot 1875-2, the
largest remaining un-purchased site, via eminent domain. Many

31
   A 1959 amendment to the 1949 Federal Housing Act called the “Section 112
credits program” allowed municipalities to obtain a two-to-one federal match-
ing grant for an urban renewal project near a university campus. This aid could
then be used for urban renewal projects anywhere in the city.
32
   Allen, Peter (2007). “Violent Design: People’s Park, Architectural Modern-
ism and Urban Renewal”. UC Berkeley, ISSI Fellows Working Papers.
33
  Nixon, William B., Urban Renewal Coordinator, City of Berkeley (1961).
“Berkeley’s Opportunity for Urban Renewal,” A talk before the Sather Gate
merchants’ Association. Bancroft Library Archives.
34
     Rorabaugh, W. J. (1990). Berkeley at war: The 1960s. Oxford Univ. Press.

saw this move as a realization of the university’s long-held desire
to drive away radical groups that they saw as a threat to institu-
tional stability and government approval.35 Just a few years later,
the university instead declared their intention of building student
housing on the site due to an ongoing housing crisis. There is little
evidence that the university had a need for either a soccer field or
a dormitory.36 The university’s housing facilities were generally
listed at rates above the average market rents, and therefore were
in low demand. From 1964 to 1970, dormitory usage dropped by
nearly half, as most students professed a preference for lower cost,
off-campus housing.37
    In November of 1967, the Regents began to issue eviction no-
tices to the residents of the 25 buildings located on the lot, many of
whom were students. Demolitions continued through the following
summer, but development stalled soon after, and campus leader-
ship left the lot vacant for nearly a year. In April of 1969, hundreds
of students, nearby residents, and business owners decided to
transform the vacant, now trash-ridden lot into a community park
and a space for free speech. Over the next several weeks, thou-
sands of people poured their energy into gardening, designing and
constructing the park. Meanwhile on campus, tensions between
students and the university administration continued to rise. The
conflict was further fueled by the rhetoric of California Governor
Ronald Reagan, whose rise to fame had been in no small part aided
by his campaign promise to “clean up that mess in Berkeley”.38
The Regents were clear that “a user-developed, user maintained
park was unacceptable to a majority of the board, and especially
the Governor’s supporters.”39
    On May 13, the UC Berkeley chancellor decided to erect a
chain-link fence around the park, declaring that he was “just a

35
     Cash, J. D. (2010). People’s Park: Birth and Survival. California History.
36
     Ibid.
37
     Ibid.
38
  Dalzell, T., Wasserman, S., & Gitlin, T. (2019). The Battle for People’s
Park, Berkeley 1969. Heyday.
39
   McGill, William J. (1982). The Year of the Monkey: Revolt on Campus,
1968-69. New York: McGraw-Hill.

janitor for the Regents”.40 Two days later, a pro-Palestine rally
unexpectedly shifted gears and students decided to “take the park”.
The student procession headed down Telegraph Avenue toward the
newly founded community park, where they encountered a troop
of hundreds of police officers from several jurisdictions, including
California Highway Patrol, the Berkeley Police Department, and
the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department. Things quickly spiraled
out of control and Alameda County police officers fired lethal
buckshot into a retreating crowd, killing a nearby bystander and
wounding hundreds. The sheriff later admitted in a deposition that
officers who had recently returned from Vietnam went into battle
with the students as though they were Viet Cong.41 That evening,
Governor Reagan declared a state of emergency in Berkeley and
sent in 2,700 members of the National Guard. The emergency
order banned all meetings, demonstrations and speeches, and
imposed a 10 p.m. curfew over the city. The state laid siege to the
city for more than three weeks. Small gatherings of any more than
four people were broken up by the National Guard, often by use of
force. A few days after the shootings, at a vigil for the student who
was killed, National Guard helicopters dropped tear gas over the
Berkeley campus, which quickly spread over the entire city.42
    After Reagan finally withdrew the National Guard in June, the
university once more erected fencing around the park site to pre-
vent the community from reclaiming the land. The Regents demol-
ished the existing improvements, and decided to turn the site into
a soccer field and parking lot. Intermittent confrontations between
student demonstrators and administrators continued until 1972,
when students tore down the fence during an anti-Vietnam war
protest. Students, Berkeley residents, and a variety of community
organizations rebuilt the park, primarily using donated materials.43
    Over the last fifty years, the university has periodically at-
tempted to reassert its property claims over the lot, stating inten-

40
     Cash, J. D. (2010). People’s Park: Birth and Survival. California History.
41
   Congressional Record (1969): Proceedings and Debates of the 91st Con-
gress, Volume 115, Part 11.
42
     Rorabaugh, W. J. (1990). Berkeley at war: The 1960s. Oxford Univ. Press.
43
     Cash, J. D. (2010). People’s Park: Birth and Survival. California History.

A “freebox” built at People’s Park in the 1990s.
Photo from People’s Park: Still Blooming

 tions to convert the park variously into volleyball courts, soccer
 fields, parking lots, and high-rise dormitory buildings. The City of
 Berkeley worked in concert with the university to assert the lat-
 ter’s claims to the site; University of California Police Department
 (UCPD) and the Berkeley Police Department have a close relation-
 ship, and jointly patrol large portions of the Southside neighbor-
 hood, including Telegraph Avenue and People’s Park. The univer-
 sity and city sporadically deployed campus police forces in order
 to destroy residents’ improvements, including swingsets, bathroom
 facilities, benches, and trees. Protestors in turn destroyed university
 infrastructure, tearing out fences and asphalt whenever the Regents
 attempted to lay claim to the site.
     The university finally abandoned its plans to raze People’s Park
 in 1989, and leased it to the City of Berkeley for use as a public
 park.44 Still, it retained a portion of the space for “informal recre-

 44
    Shiffman, Ron (2019). “Beyond Zuccotti Park: Freedom of Assembly and
 the Occupation of Public Space.” First edition, Project Muse.

ation use”, and continued trying to develop the site. In 1991, the
university decided to bulldoze the southern end of the park in order
to build volleyball courts. Anticipating resistance, the university
called in police from various jurisdictions, some from as far away
as Los Angeles.45 The UCPD were instructed to enforce the 10
p.m. curfew, and evict the park’s unhoused residents. Protestors
occupied the site for twelve days in an attempt to prevent bulldoz-
ers from entering. In response, the university filed a lawsuit against
four of the protestors for “criminal activities”, including allegations
that defendants distributed flowers and cardboard “hand-saws” at
the volleyball courts.46 After a series of riots and the partial dis-
mantling of the newly installed volleyball courts by activists, the
UC was finally forced to retreat and remove the courts.
    In this way, the university consistently weaponized the presence
of “criminal activity” and language of “undesirables”, in attempts
to shift the demographics of and derive profits from the Southside
neighborhood. Nevertheless, People’s Park has remained a holdout
against university expansion and takeover of Berkeley. Resident
and student claims to the space hold that it represents a reclamation
of the park as common, collectively owned property, and one of the
few remaining public spaces in the city from which to stage politi-
cal claims and challenge the university’s authority and expansion.

45
     Cash, J. D. (2010). People’s Park: Birth and Survival. California History.
46
   The university eventually built sand volleyball courts on the lot, which were
then dismantled in another protest. Five years after they were installed, UC
Berkeley finally removed the courts.

The People’s Last Stand
    In 2018, the university released plans that earmarked ten poten-
tial sites for the construction of student housing, including People’s
Park.47 In June 2019, the City of Berkeley, alongside several com-
munity organizations, filed a lawsuit against the university for its
plans to increase student enrollment by over a third without an ac-
companying environmental review or consideration of the costs to
city facilities. Two years later, the Berkeley City Council dropped
the remaining lawsuits following closed-door negotiations with
the university that resulted in a $82.6 million settlement. Several
Berkeley Council members and Mayor Jesse Arreguin, formerly
opposed to the development of People’s Park, endorsed the univer-
sity’s plans.48 The neighborhood groups continued to pursue the
lawsuit, and a month after the settlement, the judge ruled against
the university, ordering an enrollment freeze at previous year
levels.49
    In January 2021, the university evicted many of the homeless
residents in People’s Park and put up fencing around a section of
the park in order to conduct seismic testing and obtain soil samples
in preparation for construction.50 In response, hundreds of activ-

47
   Raguso, E. (2021, October 16). Student housing complex across from Cal
gets a ‘yes’ from Berkeley Zoning Board. Berkeleyside. https://www.berkeley-
side.org/2018/10/29/student-housing-complex-across-from-uc-berkeley-gets-a-
yes-from-zoning-board
48
   Egelko, B. (2021, July 15). Berkeley drops objections to UC construction
project for $82.64 million. San Francisco Chronicle. https://www.sfchronicle.
com/bayarea/article/Berkeley-drops-objections-to-UC-construction-16315426.
php
49
   Brasuell, J. (2021, August 30). Judge Caps Enrollment at UC Berkeley
Pending Environmental Impact Report. Planetizen News. https://www.planeti-
zen.com/news/2021/08/114515-judge-caps-enrollment-uc-berkeley-pending-
environmental-impact-report
50
   Public Affairs. (2021, January 19). Sections of People’s Park to close for
soil assessment. Berkeley News. https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/01/19/sec-
tions-of-peoples-park-to-close-for-soil-assessment/

ists from a broad coalition of student and community organiza-
tions tore down the fences and started a 24-hour occupation of the
park.51 The group that formed out of this effort, “Defend People’s
Park” has since released demands that the university immediately
halt planned development, defund the UCPD, and expand social
and health services at the park.52
    The university has continued to assert that the development
would help alleviate the ongoing housing crisis, and is therefore
necessary for both students and Berkeley residents. The university
points to the dire need for student housing, in particular the fact
that it only houses 23% of its students, and had to turn away 5,000
students from university housing
in 2021.53 Following initial op-              “Hundreds of
position, the university amended
its original plans to include “sup-
                                           activists from a
portive housing” for “very low-           broad coalition...
income and unhoused members               started a 24-hour
of our community”, including              occupation of the
those who currently live in the
                                                    park”
park, as well as below-market
rate student housing.54
    Still, activists point out that many of the people who use the
park are extremely low or no-income, and are deeply concerned
about the displacement of an essential public gathering place
which thousands of people make use of each year.55 Largely due to

51
   This resistance comprises a diverse coalition of East Bay residents, organi-
zations, and student groups, many of whom have been organizing to defend the
park since the 1960s, including the People’s Park Council.
52
     Defend the Park (2021). “People’s Park”, https://defendthepark.org/
53
   Asimov, N. (2021, October 1). UC regents approve major housing plan
for Berkeley’s historic People’s Park. San Francisco Chronicle. https://www.
sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Fate-of-Berkeley-s-historic-but-crime-riddled-
16496472.php
54
   Dinkelspiel, F. (2021, August 27). 4 stories shorter: UC Berkeley drops
height of People’s Park student housing complex. Berkeleyside. https://www.
berkeleyside.org/2021/08/25/uc-berkeley-student-housing-peoples-park
55
     Defend the Park (2021). “People’s Park”, https://defendthepark.org/

high costs, university-owned housing has been historically un-
popular with students.56 A 2017 survey administered by the uni-
versity found that undergraduate students listed dormitories as their
second-to-last preference for housing, only ranking above housing
at another university campus altogether.57 Activists agree with the
university that a housing crisis exists, but point to the fact that the
university has an abundance of land in Berkeley on which to build
new housing.58
    The university currently faces three lawsuits on its plan, from
the union representing workers at UC Berkeley and the Lawrence
National Laboratory, and the community organizations Make UC
A Good Neighbor, the People’s Park Historic District Advocacy
Group, People’s Park Council and Berkeley Citizens for a Bet-
ter Plan.59 The legal challenges assert that the university failed to
adequately comply with the California Environmental Quality Act
(CEQA). Another lawsuit accuses the City of Berkeley and the uni-
versity of violating the Brown Act, an act mandating transparency
in public meetings, by settling a lawsuit behind closed doors.60

56
     Ibid.
57
  Office of Planning & Analysis, UC Berkeley (2018). “Housing Sur-
vey Findings.” https://housing.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/
HousingSurvey_03022018.pdf
58
     Ibid.
59
    Dinkelspiel, F. (2021, August 26). Labor, community groups file lawsuits
to stop Cal ‘gobbling up Berkeley.’ Berkeleyside. https://www.berkeleyside.
org/2021/08/23/afscme-uc-berkeley-growth-lawsuits-make-uc-a-good-neigh-
bor-the-peoples-park-historic-district-advocacy-group
60
   Dinkelspiel, F. (2021, July 22). Neighborhood groups sue to stop Berke-
ley’s $83M settlement with Cal. Berkeleyside. https://www.berkeleyside.
org/2021/07/20/neighborhood-groups-sue-to-stop-berkeleys-83m-settlement-
with-cal

UC Berkeley administration building
                            blocked by police barricades
                                    Photo by Guowei Yang

Fences placed around People’s Park in 2021,
returned to the administration by student activists

Police, Property and the
  Public University
      University claims to publicness rest primarily on the assump-
  tions that the university provides low-cost, state-subsidized edu-
  cation to students predominantly hailing from California, and is
  accountable to a public governing board that is appointed by the
  state. Challenges to the university’s status as a public institution
  then rely on the ability to refute each of these claims. However,
  over the past forty years, the university has become a quasi-private
  entity.
      Starting in the 1980s, during a period of widespread disinvest-
  ment in public services, the state of California began to steadily
  make cuts to the public education budget. Voter initiatives that
  reduced property and income tax collections, alongside massive
  investments in state prisons and police largely came out of the
                                    coffers of the state department of
“Over the past forty education. Today, the state only
years, the university provides 13% of the operating
                                    budget of UC Berkeley.61 As a
has become a quasi- result, the past decades have seen
    private entity.”                the university increasingly turn to
                                    private donations, returns on its
  endowment, and private transactions and investments. The univer-
  sity instituted tuition fees for California residents for the first time
  in 1970, and has since raised tuition steadily. In-state tuition is now
  over $14,000 per year.62 UC Berkeley has also tripled its enroll-
  ment of international and out-of-state students, who pay tuition at
  rates nearly three times that of California residents. Students have

   61
     Peterkovsky, David (2021). The funding conundrum: Cal’s dwindling state
   support. Cal Parents and Families.
   62
      Vega, L. (2018, May 8). The history of UC tuition since 1868. The Daily
   Californian.

also claimed that the university is no longer acting with a public
purpose, and instead operates as a private corporation with the in-
tention of enriching investors and administrators. Indeed, multiple
Board of Regents members have faced allegations of conflict of
interest and corruption in their investments.63
    Nowhere are these contestations over the publicness of the
university more fraught than in the realm of property holdings. The
sovereignty granted to the university by the state also conferred
the power of eminent domain. This then expanded to a quasi-
absolute power to take property at will via a 1976 amendment to
the California Education code that stipulated that the Regents were
authorized to take any property “necessary to carry out any of the
powers or functions of the University of California”.64
    Following this amendment, the university presented an argu-
ment in the court proceedings of Moore v. Regents of the Universi-
ty of California that it had property rights to “samples or fluids that
[UC Berkeley] physicians took from [Moore’s] body for research
purposes” pursuant to their power of eminent domain, because
this fulfilled the university’s purpose of being a “primary state-
supported academic agency for research”.65 Although the court’s
disposition made it unnecessary to consider the validity of this
eminent domain taking, the argument presented by the university
demonstrated the nature of power as absolute and unchallengeable
in the eyes of the Regents. Unlike state and municipal govern-
ments, the university has spent little time justifying its eminent
domain takings as necessary for the “public good”. Much like in
the Moore case, the university has largely operated on a “do first,
ask later” basis with respect to the limits of its mandate as a public
institution.
    In practice, the university has found that the actual exercise
of eminent domain power is often unnecessary; the university’s
statement of intent to develop land forces landowners to sell their
property as quickly as possible as it rapidly becomes devalued.

63
     The regents club. (2011, April 15). Sacramento News & Review.
64
     CAL. EDUC. CODE § 92040. (1976)
65
     Moore v. Regents of the University of California (1990)

This allows the university to obtain this newly tax-exempt land
at greatly reduced rates, which is then often developed in concert
with private developers and leased out to private companies for a
profit.
    Real estate has increasingly become seen as an investment op-
portunity for the university, and the Regents’ investments in real
estate have increased dramatically over the past twenty years. In
the third quarter of 2018 alone, the Regents invested approximately
$300 million in real estate.66 The largest real estate holder in the
state of California, UC Berkeley owns over 48% of the property
in Berkeley’s Southside neighborhood. Initially composed of 160
acres, the university now sits on a main campus of 6,679 acres, and
oversees an additional 39,237 acre reserve system, the largest of its
kind in the world.67
    In total, the Regents own over $16 billion in real property, not
including the market valuations of several parking garages, campus
buildings, non-profit cooperative housing, dormitory buildings, and
large portions of agricultural and wilderness lands that are not val-
ued in the Real Estate Services and Strategies database.68,69 Some
of these tracts of land were obtained for as little as $13/acre, and
many were financed through state and federal coffers during peri-
ods of mass acquisition through eminent domain in the 1950s and
1960s.70 However, there is no record of the total number of proper-
ties obtained via eminent domain, as the Regents’ Public Records
office stated that “the University does not have a list of property

66
   Huang, Y. (2019, January 30). UC system increases alternative investments
for economic stability. The Daily Californian.
67
  Michaels, P. J. (2016). From the Berkeley Hills to Bishop Peak: Acquisition
and Use of Land at Cal Poly and UC Berkeley. California Polytechnic State
University, San Luis Obispo.
68
   Berkeley Capital Strategies maintains a systemwide database of real
property, Real Estate Services & Strategies (RESS), owned by the Regents of
the University of California (the Regents) for university-related purposes. In
addition, the university’s systemwide Budget Office and Information Technol-
ogy Services departments maintain a database of university-related buildings
owned by the Regents.
69
   Berkeley Capital Strategies (Updated 2021). “Real Estate Services & Strate-
gies database”.
70
     Ibid.

acquisitions for the University of California, Berkeley campus
that were acquired by the Regents of the University of California
through condemnation”.71,72
    The cover of “publicness” allows private developers and inves-
tors to profit off of the university’s tax-exempt land. In 2015, the
university announced that its Residential and Student Service Pro-
grams, which previously administered custodial services, grounds
services, and campus housing and dining, was transitioning into the
Real Estate Division.73 This division, in conjunction with Berkeley
Capital Strategies, Berkeley’s construction and development de-
partment, has contracted with private companies to hire custodial
staff, and has leased out several housing, dining and educational
facilities to private corporations, including Microsoft and British
Petroleum. In 2007, the Regents signed a contract with BP oil, giv-
ing the company financial oversight over all clean energy research
at the university, as well as a building on the UC Berkeley campus
with multiple floors dedicated entirely to BP staff.74
    The Regents’ near-monopoly on land near the university
campus creates a closed market of student renters, and drives up
housing prices throughout the city, displacing not only low-income
students, but the far lower-income surrounding resident population.
This is then exacerbated by the university’s continued seizure of
land in the East Bay. In 2021, UC Berkeley entered into negotia-

71
   This was in response to a request that I filed pursuant to the Freedom of
Information Act and the California Public Records Act. By law, the Regents’
meeting notes should include resolutions of necessity in the cases of eminent
domain takings. However, the Regents have only maintained online records of
their meeting notes starting from the year 1997, long after the vast majority of
university properties had already been acquired. Though the Regents’ website
states that records of previous meetings are available upon request, the office,
when contacted, stated that it would cost $25,000 to obtain these records.
72
    Strangely, the property listings held by Berkeley Capital Strategies do not
list several of the sites that we know from other records to have been taken via
eminent domain, and the UC Public Records Office declined to answer any ad-
ditional questions about why, stating only that “there is no… record that identi-
fies how certain properties on the list were categorized and/or why properties
may not have been included”.
73
  Kim, K. (2015, June 1). UC profits, we see exploitation.
The Daily Californian.
74
   UC Berkeley. EBI: Highlights of the Master Agreement. (2007, November
14). UC Berkeley News.

tions to purchase a rent-controlled apartment building near the
university campus. Because UC Berkeley is a state institution, it is
not required to abide by Berkeley laws requiring the reconstruction
of rent-controlled apartments in the event of demolition. Activists
contend that the university has in this way continuously accelerated
the gentrification of Berkeley, often under the guise of alleviating
the housing crisis caused not in small part by their actions.
    The acquisition of property for profitable ventures has not been
limited to real property. The passage of the Bayh–Dole Act in
1980, which greatly expanded the breadth of research that univer-
sities were able to patent, led to increasing investments in patent
licensing endeavors, often in tandem with private firms seeking to
take advantage of the university’s tax-exempt land.75 In California,
biotechnology has proven particularly profitable, and over a tenth
of all biotechnology companies in the world have been founded by
University of California faculty.76
    In the face of mounting accusations of privatization, UC Berke-
ley administrators have maintained that definitions of “public”
versus “private” should not be contingent on financing, but rather
on the public service that the university provides. In separate po-
lemics, Carla Hesse, UC Berkeley’s Dean of Social Sciences, and
George Breslauer, former executive vice chancellor and provost of
UC Berkeley, argue that the university is vastly more public now
than it was in the 1960s, due to the increased racial and ethnic di-
versity of its student population.77 Both also cited the services that
the university provides to state and federal agencies. Indeed, the
university has continued to collaborate with the United States’ im-
perial endeavors. During the Clinton administration, UC campuses
and UC Berkeley-managed Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory submit-
ted proposals for a total of $113 million in pursuit of “defense and
base conversion activities”.78 In 2003 and 2007, the UC, in part-

75
  Baldwin, D. L. (2021). In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities
Are Plundering Our Cities. Bold Type Books.
76
     Ibid.
77
   Breslauer, George W. (2013, December 1). “UC Berkeley’s Adaptations to
the Crisis of Public Higher Education in the US: Privatization? Commercializa-
tion? Or Hybridization?” UC Berkeley Research and Occasional Papers Series.

Banner strung by protesters in 2008 against UC
                 stadium construction & destruction of oak grove

nership with Bechtel, BWX Technologies, and Washington Group
International, formed the Lawrence Livermore and the Los Alamos
National Security corporations. These corporations, co-managed
by private companies and high-level UC administrators, are at the
forefront of the design and development of nuclear weapons. The
UC views its role in these operations as a “public service” that
enhances the United States’ “national security”.79
     This has continued to create tension between the university and
its students. Many recent student-led movements have challenged
the university’s property claims, attempting to “reclaim” univer-
sity-held land into the public realm. Protests over UC Berkeley’s
plans to pursue private development on the Gill Tract, a 20-acre
agricultural research station in neighboring Albany demanded
that the land be used for urban community farming.80,81 During
the “Occupy” movement in 2011, UC Berkeley students occupied

78
   Douglass, J. (2005). University of California History Digital Archives. Uni-
versity of California History: Digital Archives.
79
     “Disorientation Guide” (2021). https://vxkat.info/pages/disorientation/
80
   Seal Students (2015, April 16). “An Abbreviated History of the Gill Tract,”
Divided Land: Ongoing Struggle. WordPress.
81
     Darling, Todd (2014, November 7). Occupy the Farm. Documentary Film.

university-owned public spaces and farmland in a continuation of
earlier protests against privatization, tuition increases and budget
cuts. On November 9 of 2011, the university responded in full
force, deploying a joint force of officers from the UCPD and the
Alameda County Sheriff’s Office in riot gear to beat back protes-
tors.82 UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and Executive
Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer released a statement
defending police actions. Breslauer later wrote an article calling
the university’s “defense of its property rights” an indicator of its
public nature, as this is by definition a power conferred to public
entities.83
    In parallel to university claims to publicness, student and
community resistance to the university has consistently opposed
American imperialism, both domestically and internationally. Re-
cent student movements have also demanded reparations to Indig-
enous peoples as a recognition of land theft under the Morrill Act,
divestment from American imperial projects including funding to
Israel and the development of US state technology on Indigenous
Hawaiian land, the dismantling of the UCPD, mass reductions to
tuition fees, the housing of unhoused residents of Berkeley, and
the redefinition of uses allowed in the public realm, including in
People’s Park.84
    Student-activist attempts to redefine “public” and reimagine a
university that serves the needs of nearby residents and community
members have pushed back against the university’s ceaseless ex-
pansion. As the university moves forward with its plans to demol-
ish the park, it shatters any remaining illusion of its “public” nature
with respect to the local community in Berkeley and Oakland.
Thereafter, the university’s claim to publicness rests only upon its
historical and ongoing ties to American military-imperial
expansion.

82
  Occupy Berkeley encampment broken up by police. (2015, April 16). Los
Angeles Times.
83
   Breslauer, George W. (2013, December 1). “UC Berkeley’s Adaptations to
the Crisis of Public Higher Education in the US: Privatization? Commercializa-
tion? Or Hybridization?” UC Berkeley Research and Occasional Papers Series.
84
     “Disorientation Guide” (2021). https://vxkat.info/pages/disorientation/

Maansi Shah is an alum of UC Berkeley and
currently a graduate student at Columbia
University, studying urban policy. Their work
focuses on land rights and housing in the
United States and South Asia.

To learn more about People’s Park, visit
peoplespark.org

           Printing & typesetting labor donated.
         Printed on 100% recycled or salvaged paper